Star Trek Timelines: Designers Reveal Influences on Game

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Transcript
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yPGCbtU5SQ

 Tim Crosby: Lead Game Designer 

 David Heron: Principal Game Designer 

Tim: Hi I'm Tim, this is David, we're here to talk about two of our favourite star trek shows, TNG and DS9

How does your favourite star trek series rise above the rest?

Tim: Star Trek is about optimism and this greater vision for the future and exploration without exploitation, and TNG shows that, of all the shows TNG, you know embodies that the most, but every star trek show is kind of about that

David: Everything that Tim said about The Next Generation is totally true and it was - video over! and it was how I was sort of introduced to it. What's important to me about Deep Space Nine is that those ideals take effort, and that it doesn't just come easy. A lot of what Deep Space Nine shows is that there are these people that have to consciously make good decisions and you know Picard and Janeway in the early seasons of Voyager like they make concious decisions to stick to their morals and to their ideals, and I think that Deep Space Nine shows that even the Federation has holes in that armor, so like Sisko doesn't make those choices all the time, a lot of the time he doesn't, and there's a lot of some characters are more flaws than they are the positives and I think it's important to have that

''What about your favourite star trek series keeps it relevant today? ''

Tim: You know I think it's the fact that everyone on TNG had multiple interests like they're not just a uniform, they're not just a Starfleet officer, there's Crusher loves dancing, and you know Picard has his interest in archaeology and it turns out he's also a terrible painter.

David: When Star Trek does that that's when the shows get good, the characters that I really love in Deep Space Nine they develop these, these personalities and relationships inside of, or outside of their uniforms and then the show actually I think in many ways became about. A B plot of a TNG episode might be like Data is trying to understand humanity and he's learning to be a stand up comedian, or Riker can't get a trombone solo, where as the strength of Deep Space Nine is that you know Miles and, O'Brien and Bashir's friendship and their relationship in the holodeck and the types of things that they do and then when his wife leaves because she's not fulfilled you know how that then takes over and he replaces something so then it's this thing that is a multi seasonal sort of relationship and I think it's really what makes this so special

What part of your favourite series would you like to see in Timelines?

Tim: Well I like the decisions and the moral decisions in TNG, sometimes we have the you make the wrong decision and then you then fight the other starship or whatever, what we often have is we have like that diplomatic situation and you have two sort of suboptimal choices or something like that, both are diplomatic or scientific ways of approaching the problem, and getting that is gonna feel very TNG so that's one thing that I think Timelines is striving to do, create those situations, and of course then there's Spider Barclay, I really want Spider Barclay at some point

David: What I love about Deep Space Nine is this sort of large scale conflicts where we're gonna be pushing the player to make decisions where there isn't a clear cut idea or clear cut sort of good solution, player choice is important to us, I would feel that we didn't come up with a great game if every player picks the same solution. Do you provide the Bajoran refugees some medical supplies? Yes or no? Well you'd be a monster to say no, that's not Star Trek. Do you provide the Bajoran people medical supplies that were en route to help Cardassian like plague victims? That's a more interesting decision point, I think Deep Space Nine had this really good sense of like the political and also like sort of quadrant wide ecosystem, and how by pushing in one direction you know you're pulling in another direction and so I wanna make sure that we keep those sorts of connections in the game

Tim: Thanks for watching, to find out more about Star Trek Timelines in our future videos please like and subscribe